


The Dance Debacle

by AquaMarinara



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Jug and Betty never got together, after episode 3 or so, and now it's time for the Palentine's Day Dance, and so much fluff, canon-divergent, so you've got a good amount of mutual pining and angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-11
Updated: 2019-02-11
Packaged: 2019-10-26 00:30:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17735573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AquaMarinara/pseuds/AquaMarinara
Summary: Palentine's Day was supposed to be so much easier than Valentine's Day. Turns out it's not. Not when her best friend is eating chocolates from another girl.No matter how much has changed since last summer, Betty Cooper will always be second best to the boy she likes.~~~Bring a friend to the Palentine's Day Dance, she'd said. Too bad Jughead doesn't have any friends to bring.





	The Dance Debacle

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, yes, it's me, yet again writing far too much fluff into something that was supposed to be angsty. And no I am most definitely _not_ procrastinating my WIPs by writing a one-shot.
> 
> This ficlet was just meant to be a little Valentine's Day project, and then I figured that it could also work for the Riverdale Writing Challenge prompt of the half-month, so I threw that into the mix as well.
> 
> Thank you so much to @ithoughtyoulikedmereckless and @justcourbeau for beta'ing.
> 
> Enjoy!

 

“Palentine’s? I thought that was a joke,” Veronica starts, staring intently at her freshly manicured nails from her position tucked into the corner of the deep red couch of the student lounge.

 

“It’s not a joke at all, V,” Betty admonishes, hands clapped together in excitement. She’s head of the planning committee this year, and she’s more than anxious about seeing it all come together. Student council had been planning for the February 14th dance for months now, and they were finally in the home stretch—they just had to convince people to come. “It was Ethel’s idea, actually.” Betty shrugs. “Take a friend for once—saves a lot of anxiety over asking someone out, or not getting asked out, if that’s important to you.” Her fingers fiddle with the hem of her rust-colored corduroy skirt, currently pulled down around her knees to keep it from rising higher as she shuffles around in her seat.

 

Veronica catches Betty’s gaze, her eyes immediately softening and brows smoothing. “Of course, makes perfect sense. Valentine’s Day shouldn’t just celebrate romantic love, you know,” she starts lecturing to the others sitting by them—to the boys who all seem far too focused on the length of her legs, extended by heels Betty wouldn’t be able to get farther than a few feet in—but especially to the one boy who isn’t mesmerized by Veronica’s red lips and low-cut top. He’s currently got his nose shoved in yet another book. Normally, Betty would find that more than a little attractive, but right now she just wants him to pay attention to Veronica, to her, to anything that might indicate he’s even thought about the dance.

 

But no, Jughead Jones hasn’t gone to a dance once in his life, and this one would probably be no exception.

 

“Yeah, but I’m still asking Josie,” Reggie chuckles, the muscles of his arm flexing as he reaches for his book bag from the floor. The bell’s about to ring at any second, and the group had better start wrapping up their lunch break soon. “We aren’t friends yet, but we will be by the end of the night.” He winks, and Betty watches as Veronica’s confidence falters for the briefest of seconds.

 

“Good luck!” she trills, waving a hand at him as he exits the room before running her fingertips over the pearls at her neck. Her head snaps away from the doorway as soon as Reggie’s gone, and suddenly she’s focused on her agenda once more. “Jughead,” she purrs, voice sickly sweet as she leans towards him in her seat. “Planning on asking anyone?”

 

“I’ve got about two friends, Veronica,” he drawls, slowly as if the words are molasses on his tongue. “And certainly no wish to attend a school dance at all, let alone on my own. That would be grounds for, what would you call it?” He pretends to think about it for half a second, then a biting smile lights up his face. “Ah yes,  _ social suicide. _ ”

 

Veronica rolls her eyes, letting out a heavy breath of annoyance. “Then go with someone, dingbat.”

 

“I wouldn’t, uh,” he stumbles over his words, tugging his beanie lower over his eyes, “have anyone to go with.”

 

At that, Veronica slides her gaze back to Betty, who’s already got her eyes focused resolutely on the floor, her mind at war with itself.

 

_ Just do it, Betty. Just ask him. _

 

“Is there anyone you’d want to go with?” Veronica pushes, her eyebrow raising, waiting for a name to slip from his lips.

 

“Nope,” comes the response—complete with the sound of Jughead shoving his paperback book into his messenger bag and pushing himself out of the armchair across from the two girls.

 

“Really?” Veronica asks again, only to be met by Archie’s glare.

 

“Leave him alone, Ronnie. You know how he gets,” he sighs out, running a hand through his red locks before standing up himself. The bell sounds through the hallways as Jughead steps into the swarm of emerging students, and Betty’s eyes follow him out. 

 

She does know how he gets. She knows he’ll never even think to attend the Palentine’s Day dance, let alone to ask her to it. It feels like a brick weighing down in her stomach; is it really too much to ask for him to just consider it? Veronica’s tries to butt in again, but Betty just shakes her head, letting out a heavy breath of her own.

 

So much for that.

 

~~~

 

Veronica meets her in the bathroom during Chemistry, Betty perched on the counter while Veronica checks herself out in the mirror. 

 

“You have to ask him, Betty,” she recites once again, like a broken record that had started up as soon as she’d stepped foot inside the salmon pink tiled bathroom. “He’s not going to do it himself, but you know he’d say yes if you did.”

 

“I don’t know that, V!” Betty protests yet again, hands thrown up in the air in exasperation. “You heard him earlier; he doesn’t want to go. I’m not going to pressure him into anything, and I’m especially not going to make a fool of myself just to get rejected.”

 

“Betty,” Veronica snaps, turning away from her reflection to look at her best friend, red lipstick tight in her grasp, hovering in midair as her hands wave around. “It’s a Palentine’s Day dance, right? You said so yourself.”

 

Betty nods slowly, ponytail swaying against the expanse of wall behind her. 

 

“Right. So just ask him as a friend—it’s not like he can say no to you guys being friends,” Veronica argues, her voice raising as she grows more confident with her plan, “and then pull a ‘I want to be more than friends’ halfway through the slow dance.”

 

“That’ll just send him running for the hills, V, if my asking him out doesn’t do that already.” No, she’ll just wait for him to make the first move. He will if he’s interested, and if not, well. She hates the tugging of her heart at the thought. Betty Cooper is a twenty-first century woman—she can go alone. It’s probably better to focus her efforts on the final details and decorations for the dance, anyway.

 

Veronica clacks her heel, hard, against the tiled floor in frustration. “I’m trying to help you out here,” she pouts,” but I see you’re already stuck in your ways. Fine, wait for the boy to ask you himself, but don’t say I didn’t tell you so.”

 

The brunette’s about to stomp her way out, past the blonde hunched over the counter, when she stops abruptly. A light palm settles over Betty’s knee reassuringly, and she looks up to catch Veronica’s eye, once again sincere around the edges.

 

“He’s not Archie,” she whispers, voice soft as if even the slightest mention of the occurrences of last fall will shatter Betty from the inside once again. “He  _ sees _ you, Betty,” she emphasizes, and then at last, she’s gone, leaving only Betty and her thoughts behind.

 

~~~

 

Betty’s locker, still a symbol of her naivety from only a few months ago, lies across the hall from Jughead’s, a few rows down and right beside Archie’s. She’d picked it on purpose, back when school had started in September, and now she wishes more than ever that Weatherbee had let her pick another one when she’d requested to switch.

 

She hears Ethel before she sees her, a bellowing “Jughead!” echoing down the hall as the girl makes her way to where Jughead’s standing, shoving a few stray pieces of loose leaf into a binder inside his own locker.

 

Betty cranes her neck at the slightest angle in order to follow the movements behind her, just enough to catch Ethel shyly place a heart-shaped box of chocolates in front of the beanie-wearing boy.

 

She knows he’s probably flustered, not used to the attention, definitely blushing in that way that highlights the freckles littering his cheeks and pointed nose. There’s no way he’d accept Ethel’s proposal for the dance, she thinks—no, knows. She knows that he’s always been wary of Ethel and her advances, but then again maybe he’s changed his mind.

 

It certainly seems like he has, as Jughead takes the bright pink box of chocolates in his hand, and then Betty has to turn away and refocus on stuffing her trigonometry notebook into the main pocket of her backpack, right between her pencil case and her calculator. There’s a burning behind her eyes. Betty blinks rapidly, refusing to let any tears form. The folder full of extra flyers she had printed to hand out for the dance mocks her, its bright orange color calling her out for not having as much courage as Ethel, or even Veronica.

 

Betty wants to rip all of the flyers out of her bag, out of her folder, and shred them all in the machine she knows is lying in one of the dusty corners of The Register’s main office. She wants to tear down all of the obnoxious flyers lining the hallways, the gaudy banner spanning the main entrance to Riverdale High, the stand right outside the door selling pretentious carnations and sickeningly perfect roses for students to buy for their friends.

 

Betty Cooper had always been a fan of Valentine’s Day, hadn’t indicted it even when Jughead himself had claimed it a capitalist ruse, and yet this one miserable dance—one which hadn’t even happened yet—had managed to ruin the holiday for her this year, maybe even forever, if she really felt like being dramatic, which—currently—she definitely did.

 

Most of all though, Betty Cooper wanted to get out of there as fast as her skirt would allow her to run, out of the school, over the football field where she would be missing cheer practice later today, and all the way to her room, the one place in this godforsaken town that hasn’t changed since last July and all of the events that had come after it.

 

Sage still burns away on her dresser, post-it notes with positive affirmations still litter her full-length mirror, and tears still drop onto her pillows, soaking the fabric laying beneath Betty’s head. Sure, the curtains covering her window are now drawn tight, obscuring Archie and his own window from her view, but at least not much else has changed. In this room, in Riverdale, Betty Cooper will always be second best to the boy she likes.

 

The tears come down harder.

 

~~~

 

The chocolates aren’t worth what Ethel most likely paid for them, Jughead knows, as he’ll likely be buying more of them for himself after the holiday’s over, at less than half the price they’d been sold at the week before. Even still, they’re good, or at least good enough to hold him off until Pop’s opens for dinner later that afternoon.

 

The box lies out before him on the tiny cot, dotted here and there with little sweets that he’s still not eaten, the harsh fluorescent light of the small janitor’s closet highlighting the dips and ridges of the slots from which he had.

 

He feels a little guilty for accepting them from Ethel with a downcast face, rejection on the tip of his tongue as the cardboard box had settled onto the shelf at the top of his locker, but Jughead had reasoned that the food would keep him from having to beg Pop to place yet another meal on his never-ending tab, and so Jughead hadn’t thought too much about it at the time.

 

Ethel had stumbled her way through asking him to the dance that was only a few days away—two, to be exact—when Jughead had finally summoned the courage to put the poor girl out of her misery and send her off roaming the halls in search of another date.

 

He’s never been one for school dances at all, and there’s only one person at this school who could possibly convince him to change his mind; too bad she’d never even bother to try.

 

Even though this year’s theme revolves around bringing a friend to the holiday dance instead of a romantic partner, Jughead knows his chances of being asked are still slim to none. If Archie doesn’t ask her first, then it’ll be Trev, or Ben, or any of the other guys who are finally cluing into Betty Cooper’s beauty and intelligence. (Too bad he’s known all along. Too bad he’s never been able to do anything about it.)

 

Sure, they were supposed to ask their friends to the dance this year, but as Reggie had pointed out, that wouldn’t stop anyone better than him from asking Betty first. His stomach suddenly twists at the thought, and Jughead hurriedly reaches to shove two more of the chocolates down.

 

~~~

  
  


Betty doesn’t show up for English the next morning, or for Chemistry after lunch, or for their Blue and Gold meeting right before she’s supposed to leave for a meeting for Student Government and the planning committee. He hasn’t memorized her schedule, of course, but he still notices her absence. The office is especially quiet without the clacking of her fingers against the ancient keyboard of the newspaper’s desktop computer.

 

He’s worried, to say the least—it’s not like Betty to be absent the day before a big event, especially one she’s been planning for so long. His worst fears are confirmed by the arrival of the hurricane that is Veronica Lodge, spewing anger and disdain and far too many questions than he can comprehend in such a short span of time.

 

“Woah. Hold on a second,” he interrupts, putting a hand up to stop her rambling and pulling his feet off the desk to land on the linoleum floor in front of his leather desk chair. “One question at a time. What’s up?”

 

“What’s up?  _ What’s up? _ ” she screeches, her voice raising the second time. Her index finger juts out to point at him accusatorially, her other hand resting on her cocked hip. “What’s up is that my best friend is M.I.A. because of you. Holed up in her room, completely  _ devastada _ , and all because of you.”

 

“Me? What did I do?”

 

“That’s exactly it! Nothing! You did absolutely nothing!”

 

“How the hell is any of this my fault, then?” He’s standing now, just as visibly upset as his opponent, his fingers curled into a fist around the sleeve of his denim jacket.  _ How dare she? _ He would  _ never _ hurt Betty,  _ could _ never hurt Betty.

 

“Because you were supposed to do something, Jughead!” she finally explodes, her arms flailing around her as she paces the front of the room. Suddenly she stops and turns to face him. Quiet now, she continues. “You were supposed to ask Betty to the dance, but you didn’t. She’s had too many people let her down this year; she didn’t need you too.”

 

Veronica bounces out of the room in her pristine white cheerleading sneakers, cleaner than any shoes Jughead’s ever worn or been able to afford, and another wave of nausea crashes over him. It hits him so hard that Jughead stumbles backwards into the leather of his desk chair, all of the breath having been stolen from his lungs.

 

He’s hurt Betty. He’d always told himself that he wasn’t like Archie, or Reggie or Chuck. He’d always thought he could read her, see her, for who she truly was, and not who he thought she was. But it’s possible that his own self doubt has brought him down to the level of every other jock at Riverdale High, and that he can’t stand for. Not when it’s entirely possible that Betty Cooper actually has feelings for him—Veronica is still as untrustworthy as ever, but she wouldn’t lie about something like this. She wouldn’t.

 

Veronica had done her part, and now it’s time for him to do his.

 

~~~

 

Midge Klump guards the entrance to the gym from behind her pop-up ticket stand, a checklist of names and dozens of neon rubber bracelets spread out in front of her.

 

“Jughead!” she greets, and he winces. “Didn’t expect to see you here tonight. You never come to these things. Guess there’s a special girl this year, huh?” she rambles while searching for his name on the list and then scribbling a small checkmark next to it with her pen. He merely nods in response. “Go ahead and grab one of those wristbands.” She points, and he quickly reaches for the one closest to his left hand, his right too occupied by the bouquet of flowers he’d picked up at the small shop on the Southside. The band’s bright yellow and seems to glow brighter as he brings it closer to the oversized black blazer he’s got on.

 

“Oh yeah, they’re glow-in-the-dark,” Midge explains excitedly. “Isn’t that awesome? Unfortunately you won’t get to see the full effect for another bit, at least until someone else gets here.”

 

That catches his attention more than the glowing bracelet, and Jughead snaps his head to catch her gaze. “What?”

 

“You just have to wait until we can find someone to send you in with,” she reiterates, a little more slowly this time, as she points to one of the flyers for the dance, taped to the doorframe of the entrance to the gym.

 

_ Singles will be paired! _ he reads, printed in bright, bold red letters.  _ How had he not seen that? _

 

“I really need to get in there, though,” he rushes to explain, frantic now as he grips the flowers tighter in his grasp and cranes his neck to get a better look inside the gym. Surely she’s already in there. She has to be. “My date’s, uh, she’s already in there.”

 

“Really?” Midge questions, flipping through her roster again. “We wouldn’t have let her in on her own, so either someone stole your date or—“

 

“He’s with me,” comes her voice as Betty steps out from behind the wall separating the hallway from the rest of the party, and Jughead can feel his lungs collapse in on themselves.

 

She’s stunning, shining under the spotlights and pale glow of the wristbands, highlighting the silver satin of her dress and the sparkle in her eyes. Jughead can hardly breathe.

 

“Ah yes, of course, Betty,” Midge replies, waving Jughead inside with a wider smile than before, and he follows the blonde into the crowd of dancers and drinkers, all stumbling around for one reason or another.

 

She still hasn’t turned to face him yet, resolutely marching towards the row of tables covered in snacks and punch bowls. When Jughead extends a hand to thread his fingers through hers, she stops abruptly, but still doesn’t turn.

 

“You’re still in time,” he hears her shout over the commotion. “I think she got a ride with Dilton, but that doesn’t mean you haven’t got a chance.” Her head tilts slightly to the side, her hair swinging with it, and then she finally turns to look him in the eye, her lip caught under her teeth lightly as she notes, “The flowers are a nice touch,” and then she’s begun her march once again, her hand slipping from his.

 

_ What? She couldn’t possibly think these were for _ —“Betty!” he calls after her, the flowers forging his path through the crowd to catch up to her. “Betty,” he breathes out again when he manages to cut her off as she turns to check if the drinks need refilling. “Betty, they’re for you,” he explains through shallow breath, exhausted from his chase. “I’m here for you.”

 

“You…” she trails off, her lips mumbling unintelligibly as the pop music continues to blast over the speakers. “You’re here for me?”

 

He lets out a chuckle, which sounds more like a heaving sigh than a light-hearted laugh. If anything, his heart currently feels heavier in his chest than it ever has before. “I’m here for you,” he confirms, and the grin that splits her face has him grinning right back.

 

“Oh, Juggie!” she squeals, wrapping her arms around his neck and pulling him closer, and Jughead stumbles forward with a laugh. She sighs into his chest, a sound that he can hear even over the music that seems to slow into a rhythm that they can sway to, and then Jughead pulls away lightly, his hands haphazardly resting on her hips.

 

“I would love nothing more than to dance with you right now, Betts, but we’ve got a bit of a problem.” She raises an eyebrow at him, the corners of her lips starting to fall, and then he brings his right hand between them, bouquet of flowers and all. “I’m not quite sure where to put these.”

 

She laughs at that, a laugh that echoes in his ears even after she tilts her head up to peck his cheek lightly and pulls two flowers out of the bouquet—a red rose to settle behind her ear and a white rose to fit into the pocket of his suit jacket—and hands the rest of them off to the nearest couple.

 

Her arms come up around his neck again, her hips moving in time with his, and suddenly, he’s really glad that the Palentine’s Day Dance is most certainly  _ not _ a joke.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoyed it! Please leave any questions, comments, concerns, or reviews down below. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
> 
> Also, come follow me on tumblr if you feel like it! I'm @writeraquamarinara. 
> 
> Sending you all so much love <3.


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